Please forward.

Our comrade Richard Greeman, now living in NYC, is giving two talks 
at the Brecht Forum on revolutionary writer Victor Serge on the 
afternoons of Saturday Feb 2, and Saturday Feb. 9, at 1:30 pm.

Richard asked me to invite you to them, and I attach the 
poster/flyer. His talks are always exciting, educational, and full of 
life! (And WBAI should record this!)

Richard is the translator (from the French) of Serge's novels and 
revolutionary writings. The talks at the Brecht are being sponsored 
by Haymarket Books and the NY Review of Books.

Here are the details:

Victor Serge and the Novel of 20th Century Revolution
Richard Greeman, Serge biographer and translator of five Serge novels

*************************************************
Public Lecture One
Myth and History: Victor Serge's Russian Heritage
Saturday, February 2, 1:30 pm

This is an introduction to Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the 
complete English translation of which has just been published by New 
York Review Books and which will be read in the course. Based on 
original archival research, it situates Serge in the 19th Russian 
revolutionary tradition and reveals hitherto unknown aspects of his 
family background and psychology.

*************************************************
Public Lecture Two
Victor Serge and the Novel of Revolution
Saturday, February 9, 1:30 pm

This second lecture is designed as a general introduction to Serge's 
seven surviving novels. It explores the origins of Serge's literary 
vocation, places Serge in the context of Western modernism and the 
post-revolutionary Soviet literary 'renaissance,' and traces the 
evolution of his two novel 'cycles' the 'cycle of revolution' and 
'the cycle resistance' -- with their ironic themes of 
'victory-in-defeat' and 'defeat-in-victory.'

************************************************
The Brecht Forum is located at
451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets, on the West Side Highway)
Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15 New York City
No one turned away for inability to pay!

************************************
Excerpt from "Beware of Capitalist Sharks", by Richard Greeman

My Political Education

I guess I was born a rebel. My parents were active Progressives 
(pro-Soviet until 1956) while my maternal grandfather, Sam Levin, an 
immigrant tailor from Russia, was a card-carrying member of Eugene V. 
Debs' American Socialist Party.(1) During his Presidential campaigns, 
Debs barnstormed the U.S. on a train called 'The Red Special' making 
whistle-stop speeches in every town and city, including Hartford, 
Connecticut. That's how my grandfather got this autographed picture, 
a prized possession of his which I inherited along with his library 
of Socialist books. This makes me a 'red-diaper' grand-baby.

In the 6th grade, at the beginning of the Witch Hunt, I was labeled a 
'Communist' during Social Studies class by the son of a local 
'liberal' Democrat politician who must have heard his parents 
badmouthing mine. I had zero idea of what a 'Communist' was back then 
(we were 'Progressives' at home), but I knew that label could get me 
in trouble. Never at a loss for words, I instantly retorted that I 
was not a 'Communist' but a 'commonist' because I was 'for the common 
people.' This inspiration shut the pint-sized red-baiter's nasty 
little trap, won the approval of my 11-year-old classmates, and has 
defined my political outlook ever since.

As a Yale College Freshman in 1957, I was recruited to the Young 
Peoples' Socialist League by its Organizer, Michael Harrington, who 
had been invited to campus and gave a rousing socialist speech. I was 
soon involved in peace and civil rights activism, agitating for 
reform but increasingly aware that militant activism alone was not 
enough and that only in a new society socialism could our dream of 
peace, justice and equality be realized. However, this would not be 
the totalitarian 'socialism' of the USSR, which my parents' friends 
continued to defend, even after Russian tanks crushed the 1956 
Hungarian Revolution of Workers' Councils.

The YPSLs had me read Victor Serge and George Orwell (for whom our 
campus forum was named), and they soon talked me out of any lingering 
illusions about the 'progressive' USSR with its privileged 
bureaucracy, forced labor camps and total distortion of the Marxist 
philosophy which I was beginning to discover in its original form. 
Among the socialist speakers the Orwell Forum brought to campus were 
the Civil Rights pioneer Bayard Rustin, the psychologist Erich Fromm 
and the Marxist philosopher and former Trotsky secretary, Raya 
Dunayevskaya, whose Marxist-Humanist movement I later worked with 
over the next fifteen years in N.Y., Detroit and central Connecticut.

And of course we were caught up in the activism of the late Fifties: 
civil disobedience against Civil Defense A-bomb drills, Fair Play For 
Cuba Committee, protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee 
and civil rights. In 1958, I joined the massive Youth March on 
Washington for Integrated Schools organized by Bayard Rustin, A. 
Philip Randolph's Negro American Labor council and of course us young 
socialists. Twenty-thousand of us sincere, well-dressed, white and 
black high school and college students poured in to D.C. from nearly 
every state in the union. It was the biggest demo since the Thirties, 
and not one line in the next day's N.Y. Times. That day something 
snapped inside my Freshman heart. I had lost my last hope for 
liberalism and reform and become a revolutionist.

Spending a year in France was the next great eye-opener for me. 
Living in another country and learning its language is the best way 
to see your own country objectively, devoid of the national prejudice 
we imbibe with our mother's milk. In 1959-60, I studied in Paris 
where I learned a lot, got swept up in the anti-Algerian war 
movement, and joined a small revolutionary group called Socialisme ou 
Barbarie ('Socialism or Barbarism') whose leading comrades included 
'Chaulieu' (Cornelius Castoriadis), 'Laborde' (Fran?is Lyotard), 
'Vega' (Alberto Maso of the POUM) and Daniel Moth?(who worked in an 
auto factory). On a later stay in Paris, I met Vlady Kibaltchich, the 
son of my favorite revolutionary writer, Victor Serge (1890-1947), a 
Russian who wrote in France and whose novels Vlady asked me to 
translate into English.

During the Sixties, I studied and taught French at Columbia 
University in New York where I was active in civil rights (CORE), 
labor (1199) and the Independent Committee Against the War in 
Vietnam, to which I brought my knowledge of the French defeat in 
Indochina. With David Gilbert, I was one of the founders of SDS and 
was Mark Rudd's 'faculty advisor' during the 1968 student occupations 
and strikes. I got my PhD on a police-occupied campus at a strikers' 
Counter-Commencement presided by the radical journalist I.F. Stone.

In N.Y., I was also in the orbit of veteran Anarchists like Russell 
Blackwell, Sam and Esther Dolgoff and radical journalists like Daniel 
Singer and maverick socialist I.F. Stone an old family friend. I thus 
had the great chance of learning from older political activists, 
including veterans of the Russian anti-Stalinist opposition, the 
Spanish Civil War, the European anti-fascist resistance and the U.S. 
labor movement revolutionary heretics whose ideas were based on 
libertarian socialism and critical, humanist Marxism.

For me, these extraordinary men and women were living links to the 
revolutionary past. They incarnated its ethos, breathed its energy, 
spoke of people like Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman as 
if they had just left the room. I had the impression, in our 
conversations, of being initiated into an oral tradition which 
paralleled and completed the reading of history and the 'sacred 
texts' of Marxism. Along with my day-to-day political activism, these 
conversations (and the readings they led to) were the 'universities' 
in which I completed my political education while earning degrees in 
French from Yale, Columbia and the Sorbonne in my 'spare time.' 
Obviously, with this attitude and these credentials, my future career 
in academia was destined to be chequered, to say the least.

I spent the Seventies and Eighties in central Connecticut, mostly 
teaching French (and sneaking Marxism into the curriculum) and 
participating in the anti-Vietnam-War movement, defending the Black 
Panthers and later as part of the Central American Solidarity 
movements. I learned Spanish and went to Nicaragua in 1984 to study 
the Sandinista revolution and Witness for Peace on the Honduran border.

The collapse of totalitarian Communism in 1989 came not as a 
discouragement or a disillusion, but an exciting opening to make 
contact with fellow dissidents and revolutionaries in Russia. I was 
part of the first non-Intourist organized trips of informali U.S. 
radicals invited by Russian environmentalists, syndicalists, 
dissident Marxists, anarchists and human rights fighters. These 
contacts led to the creation of the Victor Serge Library and the 
Praxis Center in Moscow, which I talk about at the end of this book. 
With this political education and fifty years of experience of the 
movement's ups and downs, I have never been tempted to turn away from 
the basic Marxist-humanist, libertarian socialist and anarchist 
revolutionary traditions that nurtured me and that experience has 
confirmed and enriched.

My mentors also taught me to cherish the brief positive experiences 
of the revolutionary past, to scrutinize those rare historical 
moments when the tremendous creative force of revolutionary humanity 
emerged and briefly lighted the way to the future - from the 1871 
Paris Commune to the Russian Soviets of 1917; from the self-managed 
farms and factories collectivized and defended by the Spanish 
Anarchists in 1936, to the world-wide risings of the Sixties; from 
the French General Strike of May 1968 rebellions to this Century's 
rising Latin American popular movements. In these pages, I have 
attempted to transmit to new generations some of the lore I learned 
in these radical working class, socialist and internationalist 
'universities' and to elaborate and reinvent it for our times.

Two main concepts, borrowed from Victor Serge and Rosa Luxemburg, 
dominate my outlook: Internationalism and Tolerance. For me, 
Internationalism is basic: in our age of multinational corporations, 
the only way to defend ourselves against global capitalism is 
globally, through the planetary unity of the working, thinking 
creative people in all countries. This was the dream that united Marx 
and Bakunin in the First International, and to me the word 
'internationalism' still says it all. To avoid the temptations of 
nationalism, identity politics and despair, we must continue to 'Act 
locally, think globally.' So with each concrete struggle we must ask 
the key questions: 'Does this tactic increase solidarity with people 
of other nationalities, or divide us?' and the parallel question: 
'Does this tactic move us closer to our ultimate goal a new society?'

To me, Tolerance, respect for the 'other,' is the only means to reach 
the revolutionary end; if by revolution we mean a new human society 
in which "the freedom of the individual is the basis of the freedom 
of all" (Marx). Without respect for the individual, without freedom 
of opinion, without the right to dissent and the availability of 
unbiased information, We-the-people will never be able to find our 
independent path. Instead, we billions will forever be mislead by 
corrupt or fanatical leaders and manipulated by controlled mass 
media. Instead of an infallible single Party, I propose critical 
thinking, horizontal organization, and the development of an 
'invisible international' woven of thousands of links where people 
can discuss and decide everything for themselves.

For this reason, I'm uncomfortable with political labels other than 
'internationalist.' My Marxist friends consider me an Anarchist 
because I reject the State and the self-designated Vanguard Parties 
that aim to conquer it. On the other hand, sectarian Anarchists throw 
up their hands whenever I quote Karl Marx forgetting that Anarchism 
has no political economy of its own, that Bakunin himself translated 
Das Kapital into Russian, and once wrote to Marx: "I am your disciple 
and proud to be one."

Victor Serge appeals to me because he was an internationalist with 
roots in both Anarchism and Marxism, was critical of them both, and 
rejected sectarians who claimed to hold the monopoly of the truth -- 
and who therefore felt free to manipulate, raid, and split activist 
groups, to expel dissenters (and to shoot them when in power). In any 
case, pluralistic and essentially non-violent mass movements 
represent the only way for the party of Humanity to emerge 
victorious, the coming momentous planetary social struggles looming 
on today's horizon.

____________________________
NOTES
1. Debs, a union organizer from Indiana, was the leader of the 
Socialist Party in its heyday as well as one of the founders of the 
IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). His credo: 'I want to rise 
with the people, not from the people' said Debs. 'Do not expect any 
leader to lead you to the Promised Land, because if he could, he 
could lead you out again.' As an anti-war candidate, Debs took away a 
million votes from Woodrow Wilson in 1916. When Wilson declared war a 
year later, the great liberal locked Debs up in for talking against 
the draft and kept him in jail for years after the War was over. 
which didn't stop Debs from running for President from Leavenworth 
Penitentiary and getting a million votes. The government destroyed 
the Socialist Party and the IWW during the anti-Red Palmer raids in 
1919, and my Grandpa Sam was still considered something of an outcast 
in Hartford when I came along.









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Ring the bells that still can ring,  Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen
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